Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Caleb Caudell's avatar

I saw Sam Hyde and the crew perform stand up last week. Great show, I laughed my sack off, and I have nearly no patience for or interest in stand up comedy or public performance anymore. A personal problem but also a problem in the world.

On the other hand, what that show did bring into stark relief was something missing from my life and likely the lives of many others. Here was a small group of men, working together and independently on a project with verve and muscle that has some, however limited, effect on the larger world. They're doing it unapologetically, without undue deference to contemporary pieties. Their audience knows what they're in for and respects and enjoys what they're doing, and everyone else can find a fainting couch.

And here I am, in utter physical isolation, with my closest male friends hundreds of miles away, and no shared physically rooted patterns or projects, with a digitally based "career" in which I write to a totally incoherent assortment of people, many of whom would most likely disown me if they caught on to some of my political/cultural leanings or if I spoke more frankly in general. I'm not envious of those guys, I don't bring this up to seethe, but only to highlight how rare it is now, and I suspect not just for me, to feel grounded in some kind of brotherhood, to be oriented by a shared purpose with however meager a hope of influencing the larger world, beyond the sad and threadbare consolation of this rinkydink therapeutic artistic expressive practice, hemmed in by apprehensions and insecurities.

You write pretty well. I haven't seen Fish Tank and probably won't. I can barely justify watching Sam Hyde or World Peace, and I don't know if I could spend more time on that kind of material. And this point deserves much more elaboration, and I say it to myself as much as anyone, but I don't know if the Baudrillardian/simulation analytical frame has any salience or power anymore; media analysis seems played out to me, still too dominated by a fascination with entertainment or stimulation that needs to be personally worked out and transcended in concrete and practical ways and not endlessly tweezered and microscoped and repeated.

Expand full comment
Tom's avatar

I always found it quite sad that Sam basically build a platform for thousands of pay pigs to watch that garbage all day long, each idiot paying for their chance to post some ret@@ded super chat mocking a contestant. The contestants themselves are likely on the spectrum, Sam and his sycophants push them through a harsher variation of the Stanford prison experiments.

Expand full comment
2 more comments...

No posts